2016년 4월 30일 토요일
2016년 4월 29일 금요일
드라마 국수의 신 교통사고로 위장한 살인과 교통사고 흉터치료
드라마 국수의 신 교통사고로 위장한 살인과 교통사고 흉터치료
2016년 4월 28일 밤 10시 방송된 KBS2 '마스터-국수의 신' 2회에서는 김길도(조재현분)는 마산에 자리한 궁락원을 강남에 세울 요량이지만 이에 반대하는 궁락원의 주인이자 장인인 고대천과 갈등을 빚었다. 대한민국 최고의 국수 장인으로 지금의 궁락원을 있게 한 고대천역의 최종원은 희대의 악인 김길도 역인 사위가 강도살인범이란 사실을 알게 돼 흥신소에 뒷조사를 의뢰했다.
하지만 최종원이 고용한 심부름 업체 직원이 조재현의 수하에게 붙잡혔고 조재현은 최종원이 자신의 정체를 알게 됐다는 것을 눈치 챘다. 조재현은 서류에 자신의 수배전단을 보고 수하를 대기시켰다.
조재현은 사람을 시켜 최종원을 유인해 차량 안에 가두고 문을 잠갔다. 운전사가 빠져나온 순간 최종원은 문을 열고 나가려고 했지만 대형 트럭이 최종원을 덮쳤고 차는 뒹굴면서 최종원이 교통사고로 사망한 것처럼 위장했다. 이후 조재현은 최종원의 사망 소식을 듣고 섬뜩한 미소를 지어 끔찍한 살인마의 면모를 드러냈다.
필자는 최근 드라마를 보면 감정이 없는 싸이코 패스가 많이 등장한다. 필자 생각에는 싸이코 패스는 본능의 뇌간과 지성의 대뇌만 있고 변연계의 감정이 없다. 따라서 직관인 본능과 이성만으로 움직이니 감정에 따라 좌우하는 사람을 밟고 보다 더 빨리 성공하게 되어 있다. 하지만 드라마가 반면교사가 아니라 교통사고로 위장하는 살해수법등 이런 방법을 가르치고 배울까 우려가 된다.
아무튼 교통사고는 외상으로 다치지 않아도 편타손상이라고 불리는 경추 손상이나 허리가 삐끗하는 염좌가 생기고 또 상처로 흉터가 생긴다. 만약 병원에 가서 정형 외과수술, 일반외과등 수술을 받는다면 그 교통사고로 수술후 흉터도 생긴다. 이런 다양한 교통사고로 발생하는 흉터를 이미지한의원에서는 흉터침으로 치료가 당연히 된다.
Down at Caxton's 10
Down at Caxton's 10
Only have ideas, that is, write meaningless platitudes, grandiose
nothings, something that neither man, the angels above nor the demons
down under the sea, may decipher, and this illusive verbiage will
make you famous. A school of critics will herald your work with such
adjectives as “noble, lofty, absorbing, soul-inspiring;” nay, more,
a pious missionary friend may be found to to translate the verbiage
into Syriac, as a present for converts. Borne on the tide of such
criticism, not a few women writers have mistaken the plaudits of
notoriety, that passing show, for fame. It was a saying of De Musset’s
that fame was a tardy plant, a lover of the soil. Be this as it may,
it is safe to assert that its coming is not proclaimed by far-fetched
similes, frantic metaphors, sensuous images, ranting style, ignorance
of metre, want of grammar; the dishes are not of the voluptuous, morbid
or the monstrous kind. Its thirst is not slaked at sewers of dulness
spiced with immorality. These symptoms savor of one disease known
to all pathologists as notoriety. In an age of this dreaded disease
it is surely refreshing to meet with works that breathe gentleness
and repose,—a beautiful trust in religion, and a warm, natural heart
for humanity. These traits will the reader find in abundance in the
pages of Katherine Conway. “What kills a poet,” says Aldrich, “is
self-conceit.” Of all the forms self-conceit may assume none is more
foolish or detrimental, especially to a woman-poet, than the pluming
of oneself as the harbinger of some renovating gospel, some panacea
for human infirmities. What is the burden of your message? says the
critic to the young poet. Straightway the poet evolves a message,
and as messages of this kind ought to be mysterious, the poet wraps
them in a jargon as unintelligible as Garner’s monkey dialect. Thus
in America has risen a school of woman poetry, deluded by false
criticism, calling itself a message to humanity, dubbed rightly the
school of passion, and one might add, of pain. This school may ask, “Am
I to be debarred from treating of the passions on the score of sex.”
By no means; the passions are legitimate subjects. Love, one of them,
is your most attractive theme, but as Lilly has it, love is not to you
what it is to the physiologist, a mere animal impulse which man has
in common with moths and molluscs. Your task is to extract from human
life, even in its commonest aspects, its most vulgar realities, what it
contains of secret beauty; to lift it the level of art, not to degrade
art to its level. Few American writers more fully realized these
great artistic truths than the master under whose fatherly tuition
Miss Conway had long been placed. Boyle O’Reilly was a Grecian in his
love for nature. As such it was his aim to seek the beautiful in its
commonest aspects, its most vulgar realities. No amount of claptrap or
fine writing could make him mistake a daub for a Turner. In the bottom
of his soul he detested the little bardlings who had passed nature by,
without knowing her, who wove into the warp and woof of their dulness
the putridity of Zola and morbidity of Marie Bashkirtseff. Under such
a guide, the poetic ideal set before Miss Conway has been of the
highest, and the highest is only worth working for. This ideal must
be held unswervingly, even if one sees that books that are originally
vicious are “placarded in the booksellers’ windows; sold on the street
corners; hawked through the railroad trains; yea, given away, with
packages of tea or toilet soap, in place of the chromo, mercifully
put on the superannuated list.” These books are but foam upon the
current of time, flecking its surface for a moment, and passing away
into oblivion, while what Miss Conway happily calls the literature of
moral loveliness, or what might as aptly be called the literature of
all time, remains our contribution to posterity. Its foundations, to
follow the thought of Azarias, are deeply laid in human nature, and
its structure withstands the storms of adversity and the eddies of
events. For such a literature O’Reilly made a life struggle; his pupil
has closely followed his footsteps in the charming, simple, melodious
volume that lies before me, “A Dream of Lilies.” Rarely has a Catholic
book had a more artistic setting, and one might add, rarely has a
volume of Catholic verse deserved it more. Here the poetess touches
her highest point, and proves that years of silence have been years of
study and conscientious workmanship. In her poem “Success” may be found
the key to this volume;
“Ah! know what true success is; young hearts dream,
Dream nobly and plan loftily, nor deem
That length of years is length of living. See
A whole life’s labor in an hour is done;
Not by world-tests the heavenly crown is won,
To God the man is what he means to be.”
“Dream nobly and plan loftily” has been the guiding spirit of this
volume. It is a book of religious verse in the true sense, not in the
general acceptance of modern religious verse, which is generally dull
twaddle, egotism, mawkishness, blind gropings and haunting fears. The
gentle spirit of Christ breathes through it, making an atmosphere of
peace and repose. There is no bigotry to jar, no narrowness to chafe
us, but the broad upland of Christian charity and truth. Nor has our
author forgotten that even truth if cast in awkward mould may be passed
over. To her poems she has given a dainty setting without sacrificing
a jot of their strength. After reading such a book a judicious bit of
Miss Conway’s prose comes to my mind. “And as that Catholic light, the
only true vision, brightens about us, we realize more and more that
literary genius, take it all and all, has done more to attract men
to good than to seduce men to evil; that the best literature is also
the most fascinating, and even by its very abundance is more than a
match for the bad; that time is its best ally; that it is hard, if
not impossible, to corrupt the once formed pure literary taste; and,
finally, that as makers of literature or critics or disseminators
of it, it is our duty to believe in the best, hope in the best, and
steadfastly appeal to the best in human nature; for we needs must love
the highest when we see it.”
Katherine Eleanor Conway was born of Irish parents, in Rochester, on
the 6th of Sept., 1853. Her early studies were made in the convent
schools of her native city. From an early age she had whisperings of
the muse. These whisperings at the age of fifteen convinced her that
her true sphere of action was literature. In 1875 she commenced the
publication of a modest little Catholic monthly, contributing poems and
moral tales, under the _nom-de-plume_ of “Mercedes,” to other Catholic
journals, in the spare hours left from editing her little venture and
teaching in the convent. In 1878 she became attached to the Buffalo
_Union and Times_. To this journal she contributed the most of the
poems to be found in her maiden volume,—“On the Sunrise Slope,”—a
volume whose rich promise has been amply fulfilled in the “Dream of
Lilies.” Her health failing, she sought a needful rest in Boston. Her
fame had preceded her, and the gifted editor of the _Pilot_, ever on
the lookout for a hopeful literary aspirant of his race, held out a
willing hand to the shy stranger. “Come to us,” he said, in a voice
that knew no guile, “and help us in the good fight.” That fight—the
crowning glory of O’Reilly’s noble life—was to gain an adequate
position for his race and religion from the puritanism of New England.
How that race and religion were held before his coming, may be best
told in the language of Miss Conway, taken from a heart-sketch of her
dead master and minstrel:—
“Notwithstanding Matignon and Cheverus, and the Protestant Governor
Sullivan, Catholic and Irish were, from the outset, simply
interchangeable terms—and terms of odium both—in the popular New
England mind; in vain the bond of a common language, in vain the
Irishman’s prompt and affectionate acceptance of the duties of American
citizenship. To but slight softening of prejudice even his sacrifice of
blood and life on every battle-field in the Civil War, in proof of the
sincerity of his political profession of faith. He and his were still
hounded as a class inferior and apart. They were almost unknown in the
social and literary life of New England. Their pathetic sacrifices
for their kin beyond the sea, their interest in the political
fortunes of the old land, were jests and by-words. Their religion was
the superstition of the ignorant, vulgar and pusillanimous; or, at
best, motive for jealous suspicion of divided political allegiance
and threatened “foreign” domination. Their children suffered petty
persecutions in the public schools. The stage and the press faithfully
reflected the ruling popular sentiment in their caricatures of the
Catholic Irishman.”
She accepted O’Reilly’s call and stood by his side with Roche, Guiney,
Blake, until the hard fought battle against the prejudice to Irishism
and Catholicism, planted in New England by the bigoted literature of
Old England, was abated, if not destroyed; until its shadows, if cast
now, are cast by the lower rather than the higher orders in the world
of intellect and refinement. “And the shortening of the shadow is proof
that the sun is rising,” proof that her work has been far from vain.
And when from the grey dawn of prejudice will come forth the white
morrow of charity and truth, the singer and her songs will not be
forgotten.
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY.
In speaking with the author of a “Dream of Lilies,” I casually
mentioned the name of another Boston poetess, “one of the _Pilot_
poets,” as the gifted Carpenter was wont to speak of those whose genius
was nursed by Boyle O’Reilly. For a few years previous to my coming,
little waif poems, suggestive of talent and refinement, had seen light
in the columns of that brilliant journal. They had about them that
something which makes the reader hazard a bet that the youngster when
fully fledged would some day leave the lowlands of minor minstrelsy
for a height on Parnassus. From this singer Miss Conway had that
morning received a notelet. It was none of the ordinary kind, a little
anarchistic, if one might judge from the awkward pen-sketch of a
hideous grinning skeleton-skull held by cross-bones which served as an
illustration to the bantering text that followed, in a rather cramped
girlish hand. The notelet was signed Louise Imogen Guiney.
“Are you not afraid, Miss Conway,” said I, “to receive such warning
notes?” “It is from the best girl in America,” was the frank reply;
“read it.” A perusal of the few dashing lines was enough, and my
generous host, reading my eyes, gave me the coveted notelet. That
notelet begot an interest in the writer; an interest fully repaid
by the strong, careful work put forth under her name. Louise Imogen
Guiney, poet, essayist, dramatist, was born in Boston, that city of
“sweetness and light,” in January, 1862. Her parents were Irish. Her
father, Patrick Guiney, came from the hamlet of Parkstown, County
Tipperary, at an early age. He was a man of the most blameless and
noble character. During the civil war, as Col. Guiney of the Irish
Ninth Massachusetts Volunteers, his heroism on behalf of his adopted
country won him the grateful admiration of all lovers of freedom. This
admiration at the close of the war was substantially shown by his
election as Judge of Probate. Constant suffering from an old wound,
received at the battle of the Wilderness, gave the old soldier but few
years to enjoy honors from his fellow-citizens. His death was mourned
by all who loved virtue and honor. Of him a Boston poet sang:
“Large heart and brave! Tried soul and true!
How thickly in thy life’s short span,
All strong sweet virtues throve and grew,
As friend, as hero, and as man.
Unmoved by thought of blame or praise,
Unbought by gifts of power and pride,
Thy feet still trod Time’s devious ways
With Duty as thy law and guide.”
Good blood, you will say, from whence our poet came, and blood counts
even in poetry. I have no anecdotes to relate of Miss Guiney’s early
years. I am not sure that there were any. Anecdotes are usually
manufactured in later life, if the subject happens to become famous.
Her education was carefully planned, and intelligently carried out.
She was not held in the dull routine of the school-room, but was
allowed to emancipate herself in the works of the poets. What joy must
have been her’s, scampering home after the study of _de omni scibili_,
the ordinary curriculum of any American school, to a quiet nook and
the dream of her poets. Amid these dreams came the siren whisperings
of the muse, telling her of the poet within struggling for life and
__EXPRESSION__. These struggles begot a tiny little volume happily named
“Songs at the Start.” The great American reviewer, who, ordinarily,
“Bolts every book that comes out of the press,
Without the least question of larger or less,”
Down at Caxton's 9
Down at Caxton's 9
While the author will not concede that mere literary form is the all
in all that our modern masters claim, yet he would not be found in the
ranks of M. de Bonniers, who declares that an author need not trouble
himself about his grammar; let him have original ideas and a certain
style, and the rest is of no consequence. The author of “Phases of
Thought,” believes first in the possession of ideas, for without them
an author is a sorry spectacle. He also believes that an attractive
style will materially aid in the diffusion of these ideas. Many good
books fall still-born from the press, for no other reasons than their
slovenly style. Readers now-a-days will not plod along poor roads,
when a turnpike leads to the same destination. The grammar marks the
parting of ways. Brother Azarias rightfully holds that good grammar is
an essential part of every great writer’s style. Classics are so, by
correct grammar as well as by original ideas. This easy dictum of the
slipshod writers—that if an idea takes you off your feet you must not
trouble yourself about the grammar that wraps it, is but a specious
pleading for their ignorance of what they pretend to despise.
The great difference between this book and the many on similar subjects
is in the manner of treatment. It starts from a solid basis; that
basis the creed of the Catholic Church. The superstructure of lofty
thought reared on this basis is in a style at once pellucid and crisp.
The author is not only a thinker rare and original; he is a scholar
broad and masterly.
Believing that his Church holds the keys of the “kingdom come,” and as
a consequence, a key to all problems moral and social that can move
modern society, he grapples with them, after the manner of a knight of
old, courteously but convincingly. His teaching is that, outside the
bosom of the Catholic Church jostle the warring elements of confusion
and uncertainty. In her fold can man find that rest, that sweet
peace promised by the Redeemer. Her philosophy is the wisdom worth
cherishing, the curing balm that philosophers vainly seek outside her
pale. To the weary and thought-stricken would this great writer bring
his often and beautifully taught lesson, that the things of this world
are not the puppets of chance, nor lots of the pantheistic whole, but
parts of a well-ordered system, governed by a paternal being, whom
we, His children, address in that touching prayer, “Father, who art
in Heaven.” From that Father came a Son, not mere man, not only a
great prophet, not only a law-giver, but the true Son of God, equal
to the Father, from all eternity, whose mission was, to teach all men
that would listen, the way that leads to light. That this identical
mission is, and will be continued to the consummation of the ages by
the Catholic Church. That in the truth of these things, all men, who
lovingly seek, will be confirmed, not that mere intellect alone could
be the harbinger of such truths, for, as he has so well put it:—“Human
reason and human knowledge, whether considered individually or
collectively in the race are limited to the natural. Knowledge of the
supernatural can come only from a Divine Teacher.”
One may be convinced of every truth of revealed religion, and yet not
possess the gift of faith. That gift is purely gratuitous. If, however,
the seeker humbly and honestly desires the acquisition of these truths,
and knocks, the door of the chamber of truth shall be opened unto him,
for this has the Saviour promised. That door once opened, the Spirit of
God breathes on the seeker, it opens the eyes of the soul, it reveals
beyond all power of doubt or cavil, or contradiction, the supernatural
as a fact, solemn, universal, constant throughout the vicissitudes of
the age. While the author fashions these lofty truths on the anvil of
modern scholarship, the reader finds himself, like the school children,
in Longfellow’s poem, looking in through the artist’s open door full
of admiration, fascinated by burning sparks. Pages have been written
about the ideal, defining it, in verbiage fatiguing and elusive.
It is a trick of pretended scholarship, to hide thought with massive
word-boulders. What a difference in the process of this rare scholar?
A flying spark from his anvil lights up the dullest intellect. It is
a stimulus to the weary brain, after wading through essays as to what
constitutes an ideal, to have the gentle scholar, across the blazing
pine logs, on a winter’s night, say: “A genius conceives and expresses
a great thought. The conception so expressed delights. It enters men’s
souls; it compels their admiration. They applaud and are rejoiced that
another masterpiece has been brought into existence to grace the world
of art and letters. The genius alone is dissatisfied. Where others
see perfection, he perceives something unexpressed; beyond the reach
of his art. Try as best he may, he cannot attain that indefinable
something. Deep in his inner consciousness he sees a type so grand and
perfect that his beautiful production appears to him but a faint and
marred copy of that original. That original is the ideal; and the ideal
it is that appeals to the aesthetic and calls forth men’s admiration.”
What a divining power has this student, in plummeting the vagaries of
modern culture!
“Every school of philosophy has its disciples, who repeat the sayings
of their masters with implicit confidence, without ever stopping to
question the principles from which those sayings arise or the results
to which they lead.” These chattering disciples will affect to sneer
at the Christian belief, while they lowly sit at the feet of one of
their mud gods singing “thou art the infallible one.” They will not
question their position simply because “these systems are accepted not
so much for truth’s sake as because they are the intellectual fashions
of the day.” Such men change their philosophy as quickly as a Parisian
dressmaker his styles. It may yet be shown by some mighty Teuton that
vagaries in philosophy and dress are closely allied, and that the
synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer is responsible for the coming
of crinoline. What a delightful thrust at that school of criticism
that singles out an author or a book as the very acme of perfection,
seeing wisdom in absurdities and truth in commonplace fiction, is given
in these lines: “Paint a daub and call it a Turner, and forthwith
these critics will trace in it strokes of genius.” With a twinkle in
his eye he asks, “Think you they understand the real principles of
art criticism?” You will be easily able to answer that question when
you have mastered this pithy definition of true criticism, be it of
literature or of art, “that it is all-embracing.” It has no antagonism
to science so long as she travels in her rightful domain. When “science
has her superstitions and her romancings as unreal and shadowy as those
of the most ephemeral literature, then it is the duty of criticism to
administer the medicine of truth and purge the wayward jade of her
humors.”
To such a mind as that of the author of “Phases of Thought,” with its
thorough knowledge of the art of criticism and its perfect equipment,
the separating of the chaff from the meal of an author becomes not
only a pleasure but a duty. This is best seen by a perusal of Chapter
III, dealing with Emerson and Newman as types. With a few masterly
strokes the real Emerson, not the phantom or brain figment of Burroughs
and Woodberry and the long line of fad disciples, passes before us.
Not an inch is taken from his stature. His intellectual beauties and
defects, so strongly drawn, but confirm the reader in the truth of the
portraiture. One catches not only a glimpse of the man, but the springs
of his soul-struggles. Emerson in his hungry quest for intellectual
food, ranged through the philosophies of the east and west, purposely
ignoring that of the Catholic Church. This sin cost him whole worlds of
thought hidden from his vision. Newman had the same hunger to appease,
but where Emerson turned away Newman, ever in search for truth, kept
on, and found it in the Catholic Church. The analysis of these two
minds is done in a masterly way. Azarias has no prejudices. If he puts
his fingers on defects and descants on their nature and treatment, he
will, no less, point out beauties and lovingly linger among them. He is
a knight in the cause of truth, and would not herd with the carping
critics. He will tell you that Emerson’s mind was like an Æolian harp.
“It was awake to the most delicate impressions, and at every breath
of thought it gave out a music all its own,” and that the reading of
him with understanding “is a mental tonic bracing for the cultured
intellect as is Alpine air for the mountaineer.” The pages of this book
teem with thought clothed in language whose sparkling beauty is all the
author’s own. From such a book it is difficult to select. Emerson has
well said, “No one can select the beautiful passages of another for
you. Do your own quarrying.” I abide by this quotation, and should ask
every lover of the beautiful and true to buy this fecund book.
Patrick Francis Mullaney, better known as Brother Azarias, was born
in Killenaule County, Tipperary, Ireland, June 29th, 1847. Like the
majority of eminent men that his country has given birth to, he came
of its noble peasantry. The old tale was here enacted. The parents
left the land of their birth in search of a home in our better land.
This found, Azarias joined them. At the age of fifteen he joined the
Christian Brothers. That great Order gave free scope to his fine
abilities. In 1866 he was chosen professor of mathematics and English
literature at Rock Hill College, Maryland. He continued in this
position for ten years. At the expiration of his professorship he
travelled a year through Europe, collecting materials and writing his
“Development of Old English Thought.” On his return he became president
of Rock Hill College, holding that position until recalled to Paris by
his Superior in 1866. After an absence of three years Brother Azarias
returned to the States as professor of English literature at the De
La Salle Institute, New York. This is not only an important position,
but it gives leisure, and that ready access to the great libraries, so
prized by literary men.
WOMEN.
KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY.
“Next room to that of Roche’s,” said the dear O’Reilly, showing me his
nest of poets, “is a gentle poetess.”
The door was wide open. It is a question with my mind if the room ever
knew a door. Be this as it may, there sat, with her chair close drawn
to her desk, a frail, delicate-looking woman. The ordinary eye might
see nothing in a face that was winsome, if not handsome; yet, let the
dainty mouth curve in speech, and at once a subtle attraction, lit up
by lustrous eyes, permeated the face. One characteristic that made
itself felt, in the most sparse conversation with this woman, was her
humility, a rare virtue among American literary women. I have known
not a few among that irritable class who, no sooner had they sipped the
most meagre draught of fame, than they became intoxicated with their
own importance, and for the balance of life wooed that meretricious
goddess, Notoriety. In fiery prose and tuneful song they told of the
dire misfortunes that had been heaped upon their sex by that obstinate
vulgar biped, man. Their literature—for that is the name given to
the crudest offspring of the press in these days—is noisy, and, says
a witty writer, a noisy author is as bad as a barrel organ,—a quiet
one is as refreshing as a long pause in a foolish sermon. Clergymen,
who have listened to a brother divine on grace, will be the first to
see the point. Our authoress—(a female filled with the vanity that
troubled Solomon says I should write female author)—is a quiet and
unobtrusive writer. Of the tricks that catch and the ways that are
crooked in literature, she knows nothing, and what is better, no amount
of tawdry fame could induce her to swerve a jot from the hard stony
road that leads to enduring success, the only goal worth striving for
in the domain of letters. I am well aware that in the popular list of
women-writers mouthed by the growing herd of flippant readers that have
no other use for a book than as a time-killer,—a herd to whom ideas
are as unpalatable as disestablishment to an English parson—you will
fail to find the name of Katherine Conway. The reason is simple. She
has no fads to air in ungrammatical English, no fallacies to adduce
in halting metre. It was a Boston critic who echoed the dictum of
the French critic—that grammar has no place in the world of letters.
Down at Caxton's 8
Down at Caxton's 8
“Dear face—bright, glinting hair—
Dear life, whose heart is mine—
The thought of you is prayer,
The love of you divine.
In starlight, or in rain;
In the sunset’s shrouded glow;
Ever, with joy or pain,
To you my quick thoughts go.”
And summing up, he tells us the kind of a bond that holds them. It is
the
“Love that lives;
Its spring-time blossoms blow
’Mid the fruit that autumn gives;
And its life outlasts the snow.”
In 1875 he became assistant editor of that staid and stately magazine
the _Atlantic Monthly_, thereby adding to his fame, while it brought
him into intimate relationship with the best current thought of the
time. Few American literary men have not, at some time of their career,
been closely allied with the press. Mr. Lathrop has been no exception.
For two years, from ’77 to ’79, his brilliant pen guided the destinies
of the _Boston Courier_. In 1879 he purchased Hawthorne’s old home,
“The Wayside,” in Concord, Mass., making it his home until his removal
to New York in 1883. His present residence is at New London, Conn.,
where a beautiful home, with its every nook consecrated to books and
paintings, tells of an ideal literary life and companionship. Mr.
Lathrop’s genius is many sided. This is often a sign of strength. Men,
says a recent critic, with a great and vague sense of power in them are
always doubtful whether they have reached the limits of that power, and
naturally incline to test this in the field in which they feel they
have fewer rather than more numerous auguries of success. Into many
fields this brilliant writer has gone, and with success. In some he
has sowed, in others reaped a golden harvest. He was a pioneer in that
movement which rightfully held that an author had something to do with
his brain-work. It seems strange that in this nineteenth century such
a proposition should demand a defender. Sanity, however, is not so
widespread as the optimists tell. The contention of those that denied
copyright was, “Ideas are common property.” So they are, says our
author, but granting this, don’t think you have bagged your game? How
about the form in which those ideas are presented? Is not the author’s
own work, wrought out with toil, sweat and privation—is not the labor
bestowed upon that form as worthy of proper wage as the manual skill
devoted to the making of a jumping jack? Yet no one has denied that
jumping-jacks must be paid for. This was sound reasoning and would have
had immediate effect, had Congress possessed a ha’penny worth of logic.
As it was, years were wasted agitating for a self-evident right, men’s
energies spent, and at length a half-loaf reluctantly given.
In another field Mr. Lathrop has been a worker almost single-handed,
that of encouraging a school of American art. A few years ago a daub
from France was valued more than a marvellous color-study of John La
Farge, or a canvas breathing the luminous idealism of Waterman. Critics
sniffed at American art, while they went into rhapsody over some
foreign little master. Our author, whose keen perception had taught him
that the men who toiled in attics, without recompense in the present,
and dreary prospects for the future, for the sake of art, were not to
be branded as daubers, but as real artists, the fathers of American
art, became their defender. He pointed out the beauties of this new
school, its strength, and above all, that whatever it might have
borrowed from foreign art, it was American in the core. Men listened
more for the sake of the writer than interest in his theme. Gradually
they became tolerant and admitted that there was such a thing as
American art.
It was natural that the son-in-law of America’s greatest story-teller
should try his strength in fiction. His first novels show a trace of
Hawthorne. They are romantic, while the wealth of language bewilders.
This, as a critic remarks, was an “indication of opulence and not of
poverty.” The author was feeling his way. His later works bear no
trace of Hawthorne; they are marked by his own fine spiritual sense.
The plots are ingenious, poetically conceived and worked out with
a deftness and subtlety that charms the reader. There is an air of
fineness about them totally foreign to the pyrotechnic displays of
current American fiction. The author is an acute observer, one who
looks below the surface, an ardent student of psychology. His English
is scholarly, has color and dramatic force. His novels are free from
immoral suggestions, straining after effect, overdoing the pathetic
and incongruous padding, the ordinary stock of our _fin de siècle_
novelists. The reading of them not only amuses, a primary condition of
all works of fiction, but instructs and widens the reader’s horizon
on the side of the good and true. In poetry Mr. Lathrop has attained
his greatest strength. Some of his war-poems are full of fine feeling
and manly vigor. He is no carver of cherry-stones or singer of inane
sonnets and meaningless rondeaus, but a poet who has something to say;
none of your humanity messages, but songs that are human, songs that
find root in the human heart. Of his volumes “Rose and Rooftree,”
“Dreams and Days,” a critic writes:
“There are poems in tenderer vein which appeal to many hearts, and
others wrought out of the joys and sorrows of the poet’s own life,
which draw hearts to him, as “May Rose” and the “Child’s Wish Granted”
and “The Flown Soul,” the last two referring to his only son, whose
death in early childhood has been the supreme grief of his life. The
same critic notes the exquisite purity and delicacy of these poems, and
that “in a day when the delusion is unfortunately widespread that these
cannot co-exist with poetic fervor and strength.”
In March of 1891 Mr. Lathrop, after weary years of aimless wandering
in the barren fields of sectarianism found, as Newman and Brownson had
found, that peace which a warring world cannot give, in the bosom of
the Catholic Church. Where Emerson halted, shackled by Puritanism and
its traditional prejudice towards Catholicism, Lathrop, as Brownson,
in quest of new worlds of thought, critically examined the old church
and her teachings, finding therein the truth that makes men free. This
step of Lathrop’s, inexplicable to many of his friends, is explained
in his own way, in the manly letter that concludes this sketch. Such a
letter must, by its truthfulness, have held his friends. “May we not,”
says Kegan Paul, “carry with us loving and tender memories of men from
whom we learn much, even while we differ and criticise?”
“Humanly speaking, I entered into Catholicity as a result of long
thought and meditation upon religion, continuing through a number of
years. But there must have been a deeper force at work, that of the
Holy Spirit, by means of what we call grace, for a longer time than
I suspected. Certainly I was not attracted by ‘the fascinations of
Rome,’ that are so glibly talked about, but which no one has ever been
able to define to me. Perhaps those that use the phrase refer to the
outward symbols of ritual, that are simply the expressive adornment of
the inner meaning—the flower of it. I, at any rate, never went to Mass
but once with any comprehension of it, before my conversion, and had
seldom even witnessed Catholic services anywhere; although now, with
knowledge and experience, I recognize the Mass—which even that arch,
unorthodox author, Thomas Carlyle, called ‘the only genuine thing of
our times’—as the greatest action in the world. Many Catholics had been
known to me, of varying merit; and some of them were valued friends.
But none of these ever urged or advised or even hinted that I should
come into the Church. The best of them had (as large numbers of my
fellow-Catholics have to-day) that same modesty and reverence toward
the sacred mysteries that caused the early Christians also to be slow
in leading catechumens—or those not yet fully prepared for belief—into
the great truths of faith. My observations of life, however,
increasingly convinced me that a vital, central, unchanging principle
in religion was necessary, together with one great association of
Christians in place of endless divisions—if the promise made to men
was to be fulfilled, or really had been fulfilled. When I began to ask
questions, I found Catholics quite ready to answer everything with
entire straightforwardness, gentle good-will, yet firmness. Neither
they nor the Church evaded anything. They presented and defended the
teaching of Christ in its entirety, unexaggerated and undiminished;
the complete faith, without haggling or qualification or that queer,
loose assent to every sort of individual exception and denial that is
allowed in other organizations. I may say here, too, that the Church,
instead of being narrow or pitiless toward those not of her communion,
as she is often mistakenly said to be, is the most comprehensive of
all in her interpretation of God’s mercy as well as of his justice.
And, instead of slighting the Bible, she uses it more incessantly than
any of the Protestant bodies; at the same time shedding upon it a
clear, deep light that is the only one that ever enabled me to see its
full meaning and coherence. The fact is, those outside of the Church
nowadays are engaged in talking so noisily and at such a rate, on
their own hook, that they seldom pause to hear what the Church really
says, or to understand what she is. Once convinced of the true faith,
intellectually and spiritually, I could not let anything stand in the
way of affirming my loyalty to it.”
REV. BROTHER AZARIAS.
It is delicious in this age of hurried bookmaking, to run across a
thinker. It gives one the same kind of sensation that comes to the
sportsman, when a monarch of the glen crosses his path. Bookmakers
are as many as leaves of the Adirondacks after the hasty gallop of a
mountain storm; thinkers are scarce. When, then, amid the leafy mass,
one discovers the rare bird hiding from vulgar gaze, an irresistible
desire to find his lurking place seizes the observer. This lurking
place may be old to many; it was only the other day that I discovered
it,—when a friend placed in my hands “Phases of Thought and Criticism,”
by Brother Azarias. This book, the sale of which has been greater
in England than on this side of the water, is one of suggestive
criticism—a criticism founded on faith. The author holds with another
thinker, that “Religion is man’s first and deepest concern. To be
indifferent is to be dull or depraved, and doubt is disease.” Each
chapter of his book expresses a distinct social and intellectual force.
Each embodies a verifying ideal; for, continues the author, “the
criticism that busies itself with the literary form is superficial, for food it gives husks.”
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